sǣd

Old English sǣd comes from Proto-Germanic *sēdiz, from Proto-Indo-European *seh₁-ti-, a noun formed from the root *seh₁- (to sow). The same root produced Latin semen (seed, from serere, to sow), Lithuanian sėkla, and Old Church Slavonic sěmę. The word is a verbal noun: it names the result of an action. A seed is what you get when you sow. The relationship between 'seed' and 'sow' in English echoes the relationship between 'deed' and 'do' — past action crystallized into a thing.

Seeds became legal and economic objects early. The right to save seed from one harvest for the next planting was assumed for most of agricultural history. The first seed companies appeared in the eighteenth century. Vilmorin-Andrieux, founded in Paris in 1743, is one of the oldest. The 1930 Plant Patent Act in the United States allowed patents on asexually reproduced plants. The 1970 Plant Variety Protection Act extended protection to seeds. By the late twentieth century, seed had become intellectual property.

Monsanto's Roundup Ready soybean, introduced in 1996, made the seed a site of legal conflict. Farmers who saved and replanted patented seeds were sued. Percy Schmeisser, a Canadian canola farmer, was taken to the Supreme Court of Canada in 2004 after patented genes appeared in his field through cross-pollination. The case raised a question the Old English word never anticipated: who owns a sǣd?

The metaphorical seed is everywhere. Seed money, seed round, seed of doubt, seed of an idea. Every beginning is a seed. The image works because of what seeds actually do: they contain the entire future organism in compressed form, they wait, and they grow when conditions allow. The metaphor is biologically accurate. A seed is potential held in stasis. The word names patience itself.